Published

iTunes Podcasts Recommend Larger Artwork

To be considered for promotion on the iTunes Store, your podcast cover art must be 1400 x 1400 pixels or larger, in .jpg or .png format. Please note that all images must be formatted for RGB color space. CMYK is not supported.

iTunes now supports 1080p HD video, presumably to better support the recently announced Apple TVs that also support 1080p HD. And Apple is now doing more indexing of episode metadata:

We now index episode metadata in search. Include descriptive episode titles and summaries for best Search Engine Optimization on iTunes.

Something else that’s new (to me) is including different artwork for each podcast episode:

We encourage providers to include episode-specific cover art at the episode level. Further details can be found in our online technical specification.

A bit more work to put out each episode, but most podcast producers are likely editing artwork for their episode posts on the web what’s one more .JPG?

Why the Change?

These changes and improvements to the podcast spec were put out a few weeks ago and lots of rumour sites grabbed onto them as proof of a TV from Apple. In hindsight, it looks like it might have just been to help podcasts look better on the newly announced MacBook Pro with retina display.

As far as Apple's podcast spec goes it should respect an "iTunes:image" tag per item of the RSS feed that would pull artwork, but podpress doesn't support that, and I hear that the iOS podcast app from Apple ignores it anyway. For now I'm embedding the art (at 1400×1400) and we'll see if they ever get it fixed. Our artists put a lot of work into our episode art and I love iOS… wish it was displayed correctly.

I don't own an Apple TV, but a listener told me that it behaves like the iPad/iPhone Podcasts app: it only shows our RSS feed art. Disappointing, but not a huge deal. It works fine in iTunes and on the Android players. I imagine all the non-Apple podcatchers display embedded art too. No idea what Apple has against displaying embedded art.

Our art is drawn by my co-host Hunter and then it's colored and photoshopped by Corin Wentworth (http://corinwentworth.com/). LOL most of them only make sense after listening to the episode.

Thanks! We're pretty proud of what we've done. Though we're still in the process of building an audience. LOL we got the "Field of Dreams" mission statement: "build it and they will come."